Civil unions in Santa Fe... coming soon?

Santa Fe Province is about to join the civilized world, in at least one respect, by passing a law of sex-independent civil unions. You might be familiar with this concept if you live in one of the (still comparatively few) countries that grant special status to couples, no matter whether hetero- or homosexual, who choose to register themselves as such before the state.

In Argentina this matter hasn't been debated seriously, that I know of, on the national level. The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the province of Río Negro and the city of Villa Carlos Paz in Córdoba recognize civil unions, each with slightly different implications. A draft for a civil union law was presented to the legislature of Santa Fe, but it was cajoneado — figuratively sent to the bottom of someone's drawer, where it expired without anyone ever caring to debate it. The legislature, especially the provincial Senate, was dominated by conservatives.

The new administration has changed this context quite a bit. It's made up mostly by people who worked in connection to past municipal administrations of Rosario, and their progressive ideas are also supported by a majority of the opposition. The homosexual community has renewed its demands for the recognition of same-sex couples, and now they know they're close to reaching one major goal, with a law project designed by two of their own lawyers, which would give even more comprehensive rights to registered couples (regardless of sex) than those acknowledged by the equivalent law in Buenos Aires City, such as a pension when one's partner dies, and family leave when s/he gets sick. This will hold for all municipal and public employees within the province, in principle, but the project says these are rights that must be acknowledged, as well, by all companies and organizations based in Santa Fe.

The law, they say, should be passed about four months from now, in the political fullness of time, once the debate is done and the paperwork is in place. This is good news not only for homosexuals, but for the many heterosexual couples who won't marry just yet, but feel they're serious enough. The best thing, so far, is that none of that "threat to the institution of marriage" crap that is commonly spread around whenever this discussion is opened, in many countries, hasn't flowed from the pulpits or from behind the desks of bigoted politicians. I'll keep you updated on this.

PS: ... And here comes the first update. A male homosexual couple is going to employ an interesting tactic for effect — they're going to Rosario's Registro Civil (that's where people get married and receive the corresponding papers) at the Center District, and they'll ask to be married. Of course they expect to be rejected, since the Civil Code only recognizes man–woman couples. Once the rejection is formally given, they'll go to the courts to denounce the marriage law as discrimination and ask a judge to suspend its application (this is called recurso de amparo). This is all done ostensibly to bring the issue to media and public attention.

Well, the interesting bit is that, to show their commitment to end discrimination and support the law I mentioned above, the witnesses to the ceremony will be the President of the Provincial Chamber of Deputies, the President of the Deliberative Council of Rosario, plus two other provincial legislators and a national one.

The two guys asking to be married are really a committed couple — a graphic designer and a soon-to-be accountant who've lived together for 5 years. I say this because some may think this is all for show, or merely a private interest group allied with some leftist politicians trying to advertise their "perverted" ideas of same-sex marriage. How can it hurt someone or something to have a couple get their partnership confirmed by the law, I can't conceive, and this is what these guys (people with real faces, with real lives) are trying to show.

PPS: The judge correctly told the wannabe husband-and-husband their thing was a no-no according to the law, before authorities of INADI (the National Institute against Discrimination) and the Sexual Diversity Department of the municipality.

Justice being served

The long-unpunished murderers are finally getting what they deserve. Better late than never, as the saying goes, eight people who worked at the infamous Intelligence Battalion 601 during the dictatorship finally got their crimes and their sentences read aloud by a judge, after being granted the due process of law that their victims were denied. Seven military, one police officer and intelligence agent — including IB601's head, general Cristino Nicolaides, who got 25 years, the longest prison term in the lenient Argentine legal system, for kidnapping and torture.

In the early 1970s, the leftist Peronist guerrilla group Montoneros conducted bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. They (along with others) provided an excuse for the horrific dictatorship that came after them. In truth, the guerrillas were hardly a threat on the national level, and many were exterminated even before the military seized power in 1976. Montoneros was basically dead by 1977, their leaders in exile, but in 1980 they decided to return in secret for a "counteroffensive" on the military government. Somebody told on them. They were captured, taken to military facilities, tortured, then presumably killed.

Montoneros were terrorists, no discussion about that. There's no excuse for them. Yet they were citizens and human beings, and they should've been punished by the law. The dictatorship, however, didn't want legal punishment of crime; what they sought was suppressing opposition for good. They could've publicly displayed the captured terrorists as prizes, enacted a mock trial, executed them. But that wasn't the Argentine dictatorship's style: their leaders were torturers, sadistic killers, and yet also cowards. They kept little or no records (and they destroyed what they could); they denied everything; they justified themselves but refused to name what they were really doing for what it was; many have taken the secret of the location of their victims' bodies to their own graves.

This is the first trial involving a high military officer of the dictatorship after the repeal of the amnesty laws. Soon it will be one among many. The wounds are still fresh, and the criminals still walk among us.

My photos

I've been asked, and I should've posted them before, so: these are the pictures I'm contributing to the Rosarigasinos exhibition (you can see all of the pictures in Flickr group that was just created: Miradas rosarigasinas).

We obviously have no entrance fee and no way to tell how many people are visiting the exhibition, but at least we had exposure, and a local cable channel interviewed one of the group's founders last Tuesday. I did my share of word-of-mouth advertising as well, at the vernissage of a friend's art exhibition later that day.

I've been doing other things in the meantime... but my mind is in that other place!

My news

If you're wondering why I haven't been blogging lately, the answer is: I've been doing other things. First of all, and most importantly, I got myself a website (a real, personal website, with a domain name and all). It's still quite empty, and I'm not revealing here where it is, since I'm trying to keep a low profile on that. I'll be dealing with sensitive topics (religion, politics — the kind of thing that ruins dinner tables when brought up) and I don't want to be immediately associated to them. You might say this is already what I'm doing here, but this is just a small blog hosted by a free provider, in a language that effectively isolates me from my everyday environment. My bosses and most of my acquaintances don't read this blog.

I've wanted a website for some time, and I wasn't really doing anything about it because I was busy with my blogs, and because I thought it would be expensive. Not prohibitively expensive, but then I'm not going to make money out of it. However, I was under a wrong impression. Web hosting, today, is available at a ridiculously low cost and with reasonable quality even in Argentina. And if you're content with a .com.ar domain, there are no additional costs.

Anyone with a minimum of imagination will be able to guess my identity from my website. Just going to nic.ar should suffice. (If you can't pick up that hint, well...)

Another reason why I haven't blogged as of late is that I started jogging again. The weather has been warm and wet, not a pleasure, but better than the cold, for me. So several afternoons I could've used for blogging were spent on jogging and stretching. I don't live really close to any suitable jogging circuits, so I have to spend some time going to and returning from it.

And finally, as I promised in my last post, I don't want to bore my readers to death with more politics, and since politics is all over the news these days... I'll do a summary of that soon.

Rosario in the news

I peruse several local and national newspapers almost every day to get my news..., which of course would be useless to look for on TV (too much time lost waiting for pseudo-news to finish). The main local news source is La Capital, a venerable paper founded in 1867 that is Argentina's oldest of those still published. La Capital is objective enough not to pass op-ed for news, and its online version is fairly good. There's also El Ciudadano, but it's a "popular" paper so its quality is atrocious, and its website looks like something you could've designed using HTML 1.0. Then there's Rosario3.com, an online newspaper property of the same media group that owns Canal 3, Radio 2 (the main AM station in Rosario) and several major FM stations. Rosario3 is a recent addition and, though amateurish at times, it does cover certain items that the other neglect. Finally, there's Rosario/12, a short supplement to the Buenos Aires-based Página/12 written by a local staff.


I also read the "national" papers La Nación and Página/12 to get an ideologically broad coverage. I use scare quotes because Buenos Aires-based papers are invariably biased towards Buenos Aires coverage. They're distributed throughout the country but, quite logically, most of their public is concentrated in one hypertrophic metropolitan area that thinks of the country as one Important Place plus a vast, undiferentiated hinterland that provides the capital with food and football players. Página/12 does often take a look at important issues of "the interior", especially those related to social and political conflicts, which it attacks with undisguised ideological zeal; La Nación deals with national and local issues using the same pseudo-objective uptight treatment it employs with Buenos Aires news. I generally don't read Clarín, mainly because it's usually 75% sports non-news, though its supplements and journalist blogs are sometimes very interesting.

Rosario appears in Buenos Aires news almost only when something horrible or bizarre happens. Since we don't usually have floods or strange animal attacks or resonant small-town displays of misery, it's not often (there was these guys eating a cat in a villa miseria once in the 1990s... hence the epithet comegatos applied to rosarinos). However, reading Página/12's tourism supplement last Sunday, I was positively surprised by an article about Rosario.

The article speaks of Rosario as a passing weekend destination, which may be OK for people who only want to follow pre-set paths, but doesn't do justice to the city. Granted, most visitors wouldn't be caught dead outside certain areas (I myself would rather not) but the visitor may leave with the impression that Rosario is a medium-sized block of old houses plus a strip of river beaches and a few parks. The article does mention the amazing changes Rosario has had since the disastrous riots of 1989, where people looted supermarkets and stores, and the crisis of 2001–2002. Rosario was at one time the country's "capital of unemployment", and became at parts as dirty, desolate and unsafe as the poor parts of Greater Buenos Aires.

This same city, however, emerged from the last crisis with fewer permanent wounds and recovered fast. It earned a recognition for its advances in governance and development, leading to a better quality of life, by the UN Development Programme, and a recent study (which I covered) also placed it at the top of the quality of life ranking of Argentine metropolitan areas.

Página/12 humorously notes that Rosario views itself as "an independent city-state", so "if we take this seriously... a trip to Rosario is like going abroad". It and speaks of a "new Rosario" which has opened up public access to its river, something that Buenos Aires lost long ago, and notes that long-term urban planning has been at work. Despite two economic crises (with a full decade of neoliberal adjustment in the meantime), the local administrations have shared a common vision of Rosario and struggled to make it real. They've failed in many respects, or they've been forced to downsize certain promises, but an urban strategy exists.

The municipality is drafting the plan for the period 2007–2017 (I read about this in Rosario/12, by the way). It includes a project to build a multi-modal public transport node at the Cruce Alberdi, the place where the northeast of the city meets the border of the peripheric downtown area, now occupied by the Patio Parada, a railway node administered by the Nuevo Central Argentino. The project would have a small bus terminus, a stop of the BA–Rosario–Córdoba "bullet train" (which, by the way, nobody's heard of again), and (oh such delight!) a tramway station. The area will form an axis of communication within the city, with access to the airport and links with the metropolitan area.

At the same time, the municipality is presenting its urbanistic plans for this year. This will outline a number of large-scale changes to key areas of the city, design certain areas for residential use, preserve historical corridors with architectural homogeneity, prevent the disruption caused by tall towers popping out in certain areas (as is happening in Buenos Aires), and other more complicated goals. Such foresight is often marred by the harsh realities of negligence, corruption, bureaucratic delays and sheer lack of personnel... but anything is better than nothing.

Good news in short

Last week's news are like a parade of horrors, and I haven't mentioned half of them. So we need some good news.

• Tomorrow it will be (according to the National Meteorological Service) hot as hell in Rosario, but Sunday it will be cool (cooler than spring should be, but let that be a lesson on how we mustn't put away coats and long-sleeve shirts).
• Argentina will earn more from foreign tourists coming to the country than it loses from Argentinians spending money abroad for the first time this year, since those statistics are compiled (1992).
• In a brave display of imagination that we almost never witness in a politician, Deputy Mónica Prato of Córdoba will protest the lack of compliance of Córdoba Province's government with the national law that mandates free (as in beer and as in speech) tubal ligation for all women. She will do this by going to two public hospitals and requesting that her tubes are tied, threatening to go to court if her request is not granted. Good for her.
• Yesterday the sky turned ominously dark and people got scared. Everybody drove their cars under cover and lowered their blinders, waiting for the coup de grace..., but it didn't hail again.
• Bailando por un sueño will have a "blond vs. brunette" dancing duel live with Eliana Guercio and Evangelina Carrozzo, which is good news for some, but more importantly, I can watch another channel -- I don't have to stupefy my brains to endure such a horrid display of bad taste, and I can see non-paid girls far more beautiful and less disgracefully slutty than those two by just taking a walk downtown.
  

That's it. It's a bit sad that I had to look around for good news (yes, there's that journalist maxim that says "good news is no news"), but I did collect enough for one blog post. Cheers!